Life Detonated

by Murray Moran, Kathleen

  When it was Charlie’s turn, he read the words from the official report. He looked tired, his mustache a bit too thick, his wide collar shirt and plaid jacket a bit out of trend. Without glancing my way, he told the courtroom that the device was designed to explode, regardless of a safety switch. All proper precautions were taken.

  Finally, Julie was called to the stand. Her owl glasses distorted her pretty face. She kept her gaze fixed on the back of the room, and if she knew anyone in the audience, she didn’t let on. Her parents? Brothers? The wife of the police officer she had been accused of killing? She was a statue. Impervious.

  The defense lawyer made her seem like a reluctant participant who went along with the hijacking to support her husband, and for Croatia, a country she had come to love. I found myself sitting on the edge of my seat while she spoke. I wanted her to suffer, to hate her, but something about her intrigued me.

  Why did she do it? What role did she play in planning the hijacking and building the bomb? Did she shop for the pressure cooker, and then sit by her husband’s side while he assembled the dynamite? Did she type the letter of demands? Did she choose the locker to store the bomb, drop in the coins, and reassure herself that the eight sticks of dynamite were safe?

  But she did not reveal any details, and said over and over that she was not a willing participant. “I never intended to be part of this hijacking,” she testified. “I went along with my husband because I thought I was pregnant and feared he would be killed before I gave birth.” Momentarily, watching her, I was shocked by this revelation, but as she stepped down from the stand, I understood it was a legal ploy.

  In the end, the defense attorney claimed Busic hijacked the plane out of “psychological necessity, not free choice.” His psychiatrist testified that Busic was in an abnormal state when he allegedly committed air piracy, homicide, and other criminal acts. “He was psychologically incapable of committing the offenses he was charged with, and this abnormal mental state was so exaggerated that it prevented him from exercising free will.” These details did not shock me as did Julie’s testimony. Instead, they sickened me. It’s not my fault, Busic claimed, exploiting a childish exuse for an appaling crime.

  On the day of the summation the courtroom was packed, this time with a bevy of NYPD there to hear a cop killer pronounced guilty. The DA spoke for hours, during which I think I fell asleep with my eyes open, so weary of the interruptions and objections.

  Then, after five weeks and nearly fifty witnesses, the jury made their decision.

  The Busics stood when the judge read the verdict: Guilty of aircraft piracy. Julie let out a whimper. Guilty of aircraft piracy resulting in the death of police officer Brian J. Murray.

  “Yes,” I cried out, but no one heard me, as the courtroom erupted with cries of disbelief. I wondered what these people thought, that they would get away with taking, or borrowing, as Busic put it, a plane, and making a bomb that could have killed so many more people?

  Twenty-five to life. Julie bowed her head when the sentence was read. Trager had said that meant eight years. Only eight years in prison to think about the death of my husband.

  __________

  On the train ride home I watched the city pass in a blur. It seemed like ages ago I had been in the DA’s office, talking about the trial. I had felt a certain buoyancy then. Even if I had to sit through their trial, I would finally know the truth of what happened, I would finally understand why that bomb had exploded.

  But for five weeks I sat in a cold courtroom listening to the hijackers tell their story, and I still didn’t know why the bomb exploded. They insisted it was built not to explode. Charlie, the only one on the bomb squad who had ever talked to me, had been avoiding my calls since I phoned to tell him I moved to Northport. “Yeah. Good,” he told me. “Get away from the memories.” I could hear it in his voice: not her again.

  Maybe, I thought, as the train passed the 59th Street Bridge, he and the bomb squad had not talked to me because they wanted the Busics to receive the full brunt of the blame. But now that they were sentenced, I wondered if he would finally reveal what he knew.

  __________

  When I got home, the house was empty. My mother had taken the boys to the science museum, and without even thinking about it, I picked up the phone and dialed the bomb squad. “A friend,” I told a voice I didn’t recognize after I asked for Charlie and realized they had replaced Brian.

  Charlie sounded distant, wary, so I skipped the pleasantries. “I read a report in the paper that the wire-cutter activated the bomb just as the men were approaching.” I came across an article at the library by chance; I sometimes spent whole afternoons there when the boys were in pre-school, the quiet room comforting. The words Bomb Squad had stared out from the screen at me. “Is that what happened, Charlie?”

  I could hear him breathing, someone talking in the background. I pictured the cluttered office with photographs on the wall of the two bomb squad detectives killed at the ’39 World’s Fair, and pictured a new one of Brian, unveiled in a ceremony I wasn’t invited to. “Are you there?”

  Finally, he said, “I don’t know, Kathy. I told you the investigation was inconclusive.”

  I thought the investigation told them everything they needed to know about that wire-cutter. But now, with the trial over, I understood he wasn’t ever going to tell me. “I don’t want to file a lawsuit, Charlie, but I have to know why that bomb exploded. I spent weeks at that trial, and I still don’t know. Please give me something.”

  “Again, Kathy, we don’t know.”

  He couldn’t see the tears, but he could hear the desperation in my voice as I stood up and steadied myself against the kitchen counter. “Why didn’t you insist on bomb suits?” I asked. “I read those suits have saved lives.” It wasn’t a new discussion, but I needed something to grasp on to, a reason to open the dialogue.

  “I told you already, the suits aren’t required equipment.” I knew there was a budget freeze and setbacks from the Knapp Commission, which gave the NYPD a black eye, but that didn’t mean the men who put their lives on the line weren’t entitled to protection. “They’re still in the development stage. We’re looking into them.”

  A swell of frustration brought fresh tears. It had been months of these phone calls, me desperate for answers, Charlie dodging them.

  “Well, that settles it,” I told him. “As you suggested, I’m going to sue the city to find out why the bomb went off and why the department didn’t provide safety equipment.” The words made me feel strong.

  “You do what you have to,” Charlie told me. “I’m sorry.”

  I felt the thin thread that held our friendship together snap. I put down the receiver without saying goodbye.

  That night, I thought about all the repercussions that would come from suing the city. All the trouble a lawsuit would cause. It would end any chance of hearing from the bomb squad again, and a history Brian and I shared together would be lost. Ironically, if I filed a lawsuit, I would be saying the NYPD, not the hijackers, held the blame for Brian’s death. Which wasn’t quite true. I believed they were both responsible. But in the justice system, unlike life, there could be only one villain.

  __________

  Shortly after that phone call I went to see my attorney. Phil DeCicco was an old friend, and while I knew we could sit in his office for hours and talk about the times we got together to drink margaritas, those days were over. I was here on official business. Phil would represent me in a multi-million dollar suit against the City of New York. The lawsuit wasn’t about money, it never even occurred to me to sue for money, but Phil informed me when I said I didn’t want the money that, “Ultimately, everything is about money.”

  His office was high above 42nd Street. The city was quiet at that height, gleaming and invincible, straining toward the sky. Below was the Horn & Hardart where my father stood behind a row of caro
usels, shoving wrapped sandwiches into vacant slots. I could see Grand Central, where Brian spent his last hours. I turned my back on a view Phil paid a fortune to look at; I did not want to look at the sorrow that street held.

  When I asked him if I was doing the right thing, he nodded, gravely. “You are entitled to know what happened, and this is the only way to do it. The Department has tied your hands by keeping the truth from you. The finest bomb squad in the world had no safety equipment, and you can change that by exposing them in a court of law. You are absolutely doing the right thing.” He leaned back in his soft leather chair.

  “When you called I started thinking about that party last summer when Brian told us a story about the FBI agent who lost his pants.” Phil’s aviator glasses and big mustache made him look more like a motorcycle cop than an attorney. He laughed softly. “He had everyone in hysterics.”

  I nodded. “He had a hundred stories,” I said. “Keith keeps asking me to tell him some, but I don’t remember them anymore. Not one.”

  After I left his office, I crossed Fifth Avenue to the steps of the library where I used to watch Brian direct traffic when he first went on the job. I could still see him with a whistle in his mouth, his hands signaling cars to clear the busy intersection. The cold air tasted different, the afternoon sun too bright, and the memory faded, the wind reminding me I was staring at an empty space.

  The beautiful thing about learning is that

  no one can take it away from you.

  — B. B. King

  The City that Raised Me

  Suing the City felt akin to suing my mother. The city had raised me. New York City was The Daily News, The Post, and police sirens. It was kids playing potsy and slug, public transportation—a pop down subway stairs and ten cents and twenty minutes later—a pop up on Canal for dumplings, or Bleecker for a used copy of Gone With the Wind. There wasn’t a lot of room to plant a garden, and a swim in the East River was taking your life in your hands, but it was a good place to get your street smarts. I knew which gangs to cozy up to and which to avoid, just how much pot to smoke to look cool but not get too stoned, and which boys were only looking for one thing. New York taught me you could be a star. West 42nd Street was known for burlesque shows and hookers of every shape and size, catcalling from the sidewalk.

  New York! Where you could take acting lessons from Telly Savalas. Telly had yet to hit his stride, but he was famous enough to draw a bunch of teenage girls who thought they could act. On Saturdays, we ducked around prostitutes in glo-orange leotards and leopard jackets and walked up the rickety steps to Telly’s Tenth Avenue studio. A permanent cigarette hung from his lips, and he squinted through the smoke as he gave commands to clumsy wannabes. He told us he knew Buddy Holly, who had been killed in a plane crash. He sang a few bars of “Peggy Sue,” and we swooned over the dark-haired hunk we believed would land us in Hollywood.

  New York brought me Mary Lin too, and through her, I would learn the power of the NYPD, which would later come back to haunt me when I decided to sue the city.

  Every Sunday the streets of Chinatown teemed with Chinese and Jewish and Spanish and foreign-looking people who spoke languages I had never heard.

  Mary’s father Calvin told us he brought half his Chinese village to New York, and he seemed related to everyone, the store clerks where he bought congee and Lychee nuts, and the fishmonger who sold him stinky fish with eyes that stared out at me. Calvin’s white shirt was starched and stiff around the collar, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, his arms hairless and red from the hot iron he used in his Chinese laundry. He added Dragon’s Beard candy to the mesh shopping bag, told us to save it for the ride home, and let us poke chopsticks into the dish of octopus swimming in fish sauce, lick them clean, and poke them into mu-shu pork, while waiters brought steaming platters of dumplings and chicken in velvety sauces.

  “Last one back to Boomie’s candy store is a rotten egg,” Mary would yell. It was the middle of the night. Every store on our street was closed except for Calvin’s Chinese Hand Laundry, where the lights stayed on well past midnight, when Calvin did the ironing. I didn’t wonder if he slept, I was only happy Mary and I were awake when everyone else was asleep.

  “Let’s race,” she yelled, and we headed for the corner, the wheels of our roller skates sparking on the black concrete at 2:00 a.m. It was still warm, and we wore shorts and midi-blouses tied in a knot so our bellies showed.

  We shot past her father’s store where he sprayed each shirt with starch and ran an iron that weighed more than me over the coarse material, steam floating up, giving the store a clean smell. He folded and put a paper tag with a sticky edge around each pile, then ripped a sheet of brown paper from a giant roll and wrapped it around the shirts, crimping the edges and tying the package together like a present, breaking the string with his thick red fingers. We took a break from roller-skating to help him stack the shirts on the shelves in number order.

  “Race you to Boomie’s,” Mary yelled a second time, and we took off again. Our skates scraped along the empty sidewalk, until I hit a bump and fell down on my hands and knees, blood beading up on the scrapes. Through the open door of the laundry, Calvin took one look and made a face.

  “Sit down, Caddy. I fix.” I loved how he said my name and watched as he ran a soft cloth soaked in warm water over the scrapes, put on a Band-Aid, and made me as good as new. I looked out the storefront window and ate the piece of red licorice he had handed to me, surprised when a black sedan with a running board pulled up to the curb and two men got out. It was there in the warm streets of late night New York that I learned justice could have a strange and sometimes violent face.

  “This is a raid,” the policemen called out as they walked into the store. Detectives, I thought, dressed in suits. “Sit over there,” they told Mary and me, and we quickly obeyed. One had on a green bow tie, his face long and thin. The other one was heavier with a barbershop mustache and a meaty face. They pulled Calvin’s carefully packaged brown paper-wrapped bundles from the shelves.

  “What do you want?” Calvin placed his hands flat on the ironing surface like he needed support, his face bright red.

  “We know you take numbers, so give us the name of your bookie and we won’t destroy your store.” The mustached cop looked down at Mary and me like we might know who the customers were that gambled with Calvin. My licorice hung limp in my hand.

  “I don’t have books.” Calvin’s heavy hands knotted into fists. “Get out of my store.”

  After swiping everything from the shelves, the beefy detective dumped over the coffee cans with the brown slips of paper containing the names he was looking for. He looked at the Chinese characters before tossing them to the side. “We’re watching you,” he told Calvin and stepped on a shirt, leaving his dirty footprint behind. Mary’s red hair bow had come untied, her face pale, and I watched her reach out to pick up the dirty shirt.

  For some reason, it was this scene that came back to me after I filed the lawsuit. My attorney said he would put us on the calendar, but it would be a while before the actual trial took place, and so it hung over me as I started my first year of college classes. My mother had assimilated into our lives, turning a blind eye to my court case and giving me the opportunity to attend classes. The boys went to school, fatherless. Late into the night I wrote papers for my creative writing class and wondered who I thought I was, going up against the authority of one of the most powerful cities in the world.

  New York was where I found my first job as a secretary at the Warner Brothers offices in the Pan Am Building in midtown. There, I watched movie trailers with sound tracks that didn’t match moving parts and took dictation as part of a pool of stenographers. I saw Paul Newman in the hallway and he said hello to me, and Faye Dunaway in the ladies room, who didn’t. It was day after day of dictation and typing and I itched to write a script and hand it to my boss, but when I asked if he would be inte
rested, he said they had professionals who wrote their scripts.

  I said yes when Roger from the video department asked me to a holiday party. There I met Fiona Ryan, boy crazy, bouncy, bubbly, and fun. “I work for an Irish import company on Fortieth off Fifth,” she told me. I liked her right away. “It’s not as glamorous as Warner Brothers, but the pay is good, and the people are nice.”

  She put in a good word with the president, Harry Banks, and I scored an interview for an administrative position that paid double what I made at Warner Brothers. Harry looked like a pitbull, shorter than me by two inches. “Take this down,” he said in a British accent, nodding to the pad he pushed across his desk. He sized me up, now a tall redhead.

  He talked, and I took down his words in shorthand. When I looked up he was staring at the pad.

  “How fast can you take dictation?”

  I had no idea, really, but said the first thing that came to my mind, “How fast can you talk?” I thought it was a mistake, but his laughter was a surprise, hearty, from the gut.

  “When can you start?” I was startled, had to restrain myself from doing a little dance. He said, “I’m happy to have someone who’s not afraid to speak up.”

  Would I have become that way, someone willing to speak up, I often wondered, if I hadn’t defied my mother by staying in school and carving out a career different than another number at Horn & Hardart? Fiona and the friends I made through work didn’t see through me as my mother always had, so that when I met Brian, I recognized in him that same quality. Like them, he knew how to not just see me, but hold me and love me, until I believed that I really was the treasure he believed me to be. But even though I made my way from the Bronx to Manhattan and had gained a certain confidence, I wondered who I thought I was, going up against the authority of one of the most powerful cities in the world.